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Monday, January 4, 2010

Last year was an excellent reading year for me! I read 58 books which I am proud of. Most were very enjoyable and to pick just 12 for the best ones was hard. I went back and forth on my choices, but here is a list of my final top favorites for 2009 (Each are linked to my previous book reviews):

1. Pack of Two by Caroline Knappabout an owner and her relationship with her dog and other owners and their relationship with their dogs.

2. Horse Soldiers by Doug Stantonabout special forces in Afghanistan--nonfiction.

12. The Unlikely disciple by Kevin Roose about a college boy at Brown University transferring to Liberty University to see what Evangelicals were really like--nonfiction.

Your comments are welcome. I'd be interested to know if any of you read any of these that I recommended and what books you liked best that you read last year. As you can see from the above list, I like nonfiction books best.

Thanks for sharing this list! I wondered about the Boy in the Striped Pajamas so I'm glad to see it on your list. I heard about the Columbine book on GMA and I'm still not sure I get through the whole thing without constantly sobbing.

Cullen , who first reported on the story for the online magazine Salon, acknowledges in the book's source notes that thoughts he attributes to Klebold and Harris are conjecture gleaned from the record the pair left behind.

Jeff Kass takes a more straightforward approach in "Columbine: A True Crime Story," working backward from the events of the fateful day.The Denver Post

Mr. Cullen insists that the killers enjoyed "far more friends than the average adolescent," with Harris in particular being a regular Casanova who "on the ultimate high school scorecard . . . outscored much of the football team." The author's footnotes do not reveal how he knows this; when I asked him about it while preparing this review, Mr. Cullen said he did not necessarily mean to imply that Harris was sexually active. But what else would such words mean?

"Eric and Dylan never had any girlfriends," the more sober Mr. Kass writes, and were "probably virgins upon death." Wall Street Journal

I gave Andy "When the Game was Ours" for X-Mas which he is reading and enjoying now. Jackie MacMullan is a terrific writer and I enjoy watching her on ESPN and listening to her weekly on the local Boston sports radio interviews. I miss reading her in the Globe though.